Seasonality in the local and remote atmospheric response to sea surface temperature anomalies.

Abstract

Two apparently contradictory situations are provided by observations of the atmospheric response to sea surface temperature anomalies. These are: the extratropical regions of the winter hemisphere appear to posess strong teleconnections with equatorial forcing but weak or non-existent connections with local (extratropical) heating anomalies; the extratropical regions of the summer hemisphere are quite sensitive to local thermal forcing but apparently unaffected by the remote forcing from equatorial regions. An attempt is made to provide a consistent physical picture which simultaneously embraces these two situations.-from Author